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Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/opinion/roy-cohn-trump.html

To understand the anatomy of Donald Trump, you have to understand Roy Cohn and the prominence he played in the 50s and 60s in New York and Trump's early years.

Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump

From McCarthyism to the mob to Trump, Cohn enabled evil. Why did elites embrace him?

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG, Opinion Columnist | Published Sept. 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

Near the beginning of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the new documentary about the lawyer and power broker who mentored Donald Trump, an interviewee says, “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law, was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence, you knew you were in the presence of evil.” He wasn’t being hyperbolic.

The film, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, will likely be of wide interest because of how Cohn helps explain Trump. In the attorney’s life, you can see the strange ease with which a sybaritic con man fit in with crusading social reactionaries. You see the glee Cohn derived from being an exception to the rules he enforced on weaker people. From him, Trump learned how, when he was in trouble, to change the subject by acting outrageously, to never apologize and always stay on the offense. When the Justice Department claimed that apartment buildings owned by the Trump family were discriminating against black renters, it was Cohn’s idea to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million.

In the 1950s, as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn wasn’t just a key player in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the time. He also persecuted men in the State Department who were suspected of being gay, despite being a closeted gay man himself. Later, he became a consigliere to New York’s mafia families, some of whom also had ties to Trump, even as he ranted about law and order.

The film’s title comes from something Trump said when he was frustrated with then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Cohn was Trump’s template for what a lawyer is supposed to be. (In Attorney General Bill Barr, he seems to have found someone who satisfies him.) “Roy was somebody that had no boundaries,” a lawyer in his firm says in the film. “And if you were on the right side of him, it was great. And if you were on the wrong side of him, it was terrible.”

But what I found most striking about “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” wasn’t its insights into the thuggish president, whose particularly brand of malevolence has been theorized to death. It was its reminders of just how decadent, in every sense, New York society used to be. Cohn was manifestly despicable, but he was embraced, rather than shunned, by New York elites. For a time, he had a sham engagement to Barbara Walters. He hung out with the famed artist Andy Warhol and was a regular at the oft-mythologized nightclub Studio 54.

Warhol is only briefly mentioned in the film, but his diaries mention Cohn’s parties repeatedly. “And when you go to these Roy Cohn things all everybody says is, ‘It’s so amusing, it’s so interesting, because you never know who you’ll find at these things,’” Warhol wrote in 1982. In 1985, he described Cohn’s birthday party at the New York nightclub The Palladium. TV monitors showed Cohn’s anti-Communist speeches from the 1950s. “And that was exciting, it was the best thing,” wrote Warhol.

To understand the milieu Cohn moved in is, I think, to understand at least some of the generation gap among elites over what’s sometimes called “cancel culture” or “call-out culture” or even just “political correctness.” If you are under 35 or 40, it’s probably hard to grasp just how much depravity used to be tolerated in fancy circles, and, further, how tolerating it was itself taken as a sign of sophistication

During Warhol’s heyday, the amoral celebration of fame was considered glamorous and edgy, and genuine outrage was deeply uncool. Similar values still predominated when I moved to New York almost 20 years ago, when figures like Harvey Weinstein seemed to rule the city.

It wasn’t until the intertwined ascents of social media and millennial progressives that the zeitgeist really turned, and jaded acceptance of the status quo fell from fashion. Younger people, scarred by the wreckage of the financial crisis, looked at the world they’d inherited and felt wide-ranging moral indignation. Unlike their elders, they hadn’t watched the radical promise of the late ’60s curdle into violence and farce, and so weren’t disillusioned with the left.

Today, wealth and power can still buy horrible people a degree of social acceptance. Sean Spicer lied to the American people for a living and is now on “Dancing With the Stars.” Ivanka Trump is still reportedly invited to celebrity weddings. But the left has far more cultural power than in the past, and some on the left have used that power to re-moralize the public square. Sometimes that means ostracizing people, or, as they say on the internet, canceling them. A more decent society would have done that to Cohn.

Still, it’s easy see why the way the left deploys its influence feels, to some, inquisitorial. The religious right, of course, hates the new cultural mores because it wanted to re-moralize America on its terms. But plenty of liberals are nostalgic for a less sanctimonious era, where, at least in certain cosmopolitan precincts, being amusing and interesting were more important than being upright. Sometimes I feel this nostalgia myself; if you came of age in a culture that celebrated transgression, norms that demand sensitivity can feel restrictive.

But to see the way Cohn was accepted among artists, socialites and the demimonde of New York night life is to be reminded how warped the city’s values used to be. That’s why, for so long, Trump was able to thrive here.

In the end, the social world in which Cohn could be at once a right-wing dirty trickster and a celebrity bon vivant did have rules, and he ran afoul of them. In 1986, after a lifetime of skirting consequences for his corruption, Cohn was disbarred for cheating his clients. (At one point Cohn allegedly dressed up like a male nurse to get a dying multimillionaire client to sign a document making him a trustee of his estate.)

Unable to practice law, his power evanesced. In “Where’s My Roy Cohn,” an old friend explains how, every year, Cohn held a private dinner for his intimates. After the disbarment, the friend arrived at one such dinner. “When I get there, this long table was set, and nobody came,” he said. At the same time, Cohn was dying of AIDS, though he refused to admit it. Trump, his protégé, cut him off. New York wasn’t more forgiving back then. It was just more forgiving of certain people.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?’ Review: A Fixer’s Progress

A documentary traces the life and times of a notorious lawyer whose career stretched from Joseph McCarthy to Donald J. Trump.

By A.O. Scott | Published Sept. 19, 2019 Updated Sept. 20, 2019, 12:00 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted September 20, 2019 8:50 AM ET |

In a television interview near the end of his life, Roy Cohn predicted that his obituaries would lead with Senator Joseph McCarthy. He wasn’t wrong. Thanks partly to the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Cohn’s role as the Wisconsin senator’s youthful counsel was imprinted on the public memory and seemed, when Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, to be the most significant episode in a contentious public career.

Lately, the emphasis has shifted, in part thanks to Cohn’s association, in the ’70s and ’80s, with the New York real estate developer who is now the president of the United States. Matt Tyrnauer’s compact and informative new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” quotes President Trump in its title. The film’s answer to the question suggests that Cohn is among the threads that link the politics of the Red Scare with whatever it is we’re living through now. He’s still around.

As one of the principal characters in Tony Kushner’s great play “Angels in America” — an embodiment of hubris and shame, not without a tragic dimension — Cohn has been posthumously played by a handful of first-rate actors, including Al Pacino, Nathan Lane and F. Murray Abraham. The man himself, reanimated by Tyrnauer (a former writer for Vanity Fair) in newsreels and video clips, evidences a certain slippery charm, a relish for verbal combat, and what can only be called a passionate disdain for the truth.

Cohn’s personality and career are fleshed out by the testimony of accomplices and witnesses, lawyers and journalists (including Sam Roberts of The New York Times). The story they tell zigzags a bit on its way from an unhappy, privileged childhood through precocious success to disbarment and death. It’s the chronicle of a closeted gay man’s fate in a hostile environment and also, contrapuntally, of an unscrupulous fixer’s progress.

The people who reveal the worst about Cohn are the ones who knew him best — friends, family members, a former lover and a handful of colleagues. Some are well known, like Roger Stone, Cohn’s protégé in the dark arts of political manipulation. Others, like two of Cohn’s younger cousins, are private citizens who give an intimate account of their relative’s public corruption.

Nearly all of their reminiscences are tinged with the kind of astonishment that can start to sound like admiration. The chutzpah! The ambition! The nerve!

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” offers a critical account of its subject’s ethically dubious behavior, early and late. As part of the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, he made ex parte phone calls to the judge urging that the couple be sentenced to death. Later, he defended organized crime bosses and cooked his own books.

Through it all, he was a fixture of New York society and a welcome guest in Washington power circles. He counted Ronald and Nancy Reagan among his friends, and friendship was a crucial tool in his arsenal. He was good at knowing when favors needed to be done and when they needed to be called in. He made a great show of loyalty, and received it in return.

Television interviewers, even when they made a show of asking Cohn tough questions, tended to fawn over his intelligence and connections. There is no doubt that he was a fascinating and important character, but “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask.

Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents. It’s not that any of the high-minded, good-doing, often professedly liberal people who invited him to parties and accepted his favors necessarily approved of him, any more than they approved of, say, Harvey Weinstein or Trump himself. But they kept him around, out of some combination of cynicism, self-interest and curiosity that remains an underexamined and toxic force in the history of our time.

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